crests, to vanish rather than die. But Susan, pleading a desire
to settle down after much wandering, begged off. She did not tell me
that she had a private sanctuary, too long unvisited, hidden among
nearer and humbler hills.

The rough fields of the old farm were now rich with crimson and
gold--bright yellow gold, red gold, green and tarnished gold--or misted
over with the horizon blue of wild asters, a needed softening of tone in
a world else so vibrant with light, so nakedly clear. This was another
and perhaps even a deeper intoxication than that of the flood tide of
spring. Unbearably beautiful it grew at its climax of splendor! An
unseen organist unloosed all his stops, and Susan, like a little child
overpowered by that rocking clamor, was shaken by it and almost
whimpered for mercy....

It was not until the following spring that chance improbably betrayed
her guarded secret to me. All during the preceding fall I had wondered
at times that I found it so increasingly difficult to arrange for
afternoons of tennis or golf or riding with Susan; but I admonished
myself that as she grew up she must inevitably find personal interests
and younger friends, and it was not for me to limit or question her
freedom. And though Susan never lied to me, she was clever enough, and
woman enough, to let me mislead myself.

"I've been taking a long walk, Ambo." "I've been riding."

Well, bless her, so she had--and why shouldn't she? Though it came at
last with me to a vague, comfortless feeling of shut-outness--of too
often missing an undefined something that I had hoped to share.

During a long winter of close companionship in study and socially
unsocial life this feeling disappeared, but with the spring it gradually
formed again, like a little spreading cloud in an empty sky. And one
afternoon, toward middle May, I discovered myself to be unaccountably
alone and wishing Susan were round--so we could "do something." The day
was a day apart. Mummies that day, in dim museums, ached in their
cerements. Middle-aged bank clerks behind grilles knew a sudden unrest,
and one or two of them even wondered whether to be always honestly
handling the false counters of life were any compensation for never
having riotously lived. Little boys along Hillhouse Avenue, ordinarily
well-behaved, turned freakishly truculent, delighted in combat, and
pummelled each other with ineffective fists. Settled professors in
classrooms were seized with irrelev